Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Conspiracy theories, breakdown, murder. Everything’s gonna be all right. Until it isn’t.

How many hours of sleep did you get last night? Rate your overall mood from 1 to 5, 1 being poor. Rate your stress level from 1 to 5, 5 being severe. Are you experiencing depression or thoughts of suicide? Is there anything in your personal life that is affecting your duty?

When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the U.S. Air Force is drawn into a web of suppositions, wild theories, and outright lies. He reports to work every night in a bare, sterile fortress that serves as no protection from a situation that threatens the sanity of Teddy, his childhood friend and boyfriend of the missing woman. Sabrina's grieving sister Sandra struggles to fill her days waiting in purgatory. After a videotape surfaces, we see devastation through a cinematic lens, as true tragedy is distorted when fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists begin to interpret events to fit their own narratives.

The follow-up to Nick Drnaso’s LA TimesBook Prize winning Beverly, Sabrina depicts a modern world devoid of personal interaction and responsibility, where relationships are stripped of intimacy through glowing computer screens. An indictment of our modern state, Drnasocontemplates the dangers of a fake news climate. Timely and articulate, Sabrina leaves you gutted, searching for meaning in the aftermath of disaster.

Praise for Sabrina

Nick Drnaso's Sabrina is the best book—in any medium—I have read about our current moment. It is a masterpiece, beautifully written and drawn, possessing all the political power of polemic and yet simultaneously all the delicacy of truly great art. It scared me. I loved it.

Zadie Smith

Nick Drnaso's Sabrina is full of ominous, dead-quiet catastrophe. The faces of his stoic characters are as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa's, as they confront modern terror with blank, fathomless smirks. Never sentimental or satirical (we've all had enough of that), Drnaso chronicles the American climate of fear, isolation, mainstream misinformation, and fringe paranoia with perfect lucidity. Sabrina steeps the mundane in shadowy mystery and grand tragedy; fans of Chris Ware, Todd Solondz, and Don DeLillo should read this immediately.

Tony Tulathimutte

Nick Drnaso is one of the most ambitious, singular cartoonists to emerge in recent years, and his dedication to novelistic fiction is an inspiration. Incisive, chilling, and completely unpredictable, Sabrina demonstrates the inexplicable power of comics at their best.

Adrian Tomine, Killing and Dying

Sabrina is startling. Drnaso's formal ingenuity and confidence is matched by the acuity and depth of the story's awareness of who and where we are right now.

Jonathan Lethem

Drnaso depicts an indictment of our modern state – a world devoid of personal interaction, responsibility and intimacy – and contemplates the dangers of a fake news climate.